January 2008

January 30, 2008

I remember learning in high school geography class of the peril faced by the ancient Egyptian temple of Abu Simbel, which had stood since the reign of the pharaohs. Rising water behind Egypt’s Aswan Dam threatened to submerge the four enormous seated figures and the tomb they protected, so UNESCO—the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization—had organized an international effort to dismantle and relocate the temple to high ground. My classmates and I tossed our quarters in milk cartons in faraway La Mesa, California, doing our part to save a part of the world’s history.

That memory added to my anticipation when I found myself journeying to see the temple 40 years later, on a brilliant January morning early in 2008.

The monument doesn’t disappoint. Even the busloads of other tourists don’t detract from its grandeur. I walked a few hundred yards away, where I could be alone to reflect and take a few whimsical photos.

What I hadn’t remembered was the plight of the people who lived in that valley with Abu Simbel. They too had to be relocated, leaving their villages behind. They were the Nubians.

Dr. Hala Kh. Nassar, a professor of Arabic literature at Yale, and a guide on our tour, directed me to a slim volume by Haggag Hassan Oddoul, titled Nights of Musk: Stories from Old Nubia. I bought it at the Aswan airport and read it on the flight home. It brought tears to my eyes.

We told ourselves that we would have to be patient. The women too would have to be patient. The flood season was approaching, and as you may or may not know, the flood season is nothing more than the long, broad river’s manhood overflowing his banks with the water of life. It mounts the land, and plants are born and udders grow fat.

The progress of the Aswan dam and the subsequent loss of Nubian villages reminds us that monumental technological advance often comes with a high human price. The Suez Canal, opened in 1869, led to the bankruptcy of Egypt and British occupation (see Zachary Karabell's marvelous history, Parting the Desert: The Creation of the Suez Canal. And one can only imagine the human cost, so many years ago, of building the Pyramids of Giza.

If there were poets of Giza who sang of the struggle to build those wonders, they are lost to us. Fortunately, we still have today not only the monumental Aswan Dam, but the poets of modern Arabic literature who tell the human story.

January 24, 2008

Most people call them reading lists. I call them your Library of Candidates—books you look forward to reading. Rocket Boys recently moved from my Library of Candidates to my Living Library. I’d recommend it for your Library, too.

Like many communities across America, our county of Palm Beach, Florida, chooses a book to read together. The leader of our local organization (www.pbcliteracy.org) asked me to read and recommend one of the five books being voted on; I’m so glad she did. I had seen the movie October Sky, but had not read the book it was based on. Here is my pitch for this lovely memoir.

Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam Jr.

The story begins with the blast-off of Sputnik in October of 1957. The beep-beep-beep of this first satellite from our atomic rivals unnerves grownups in Cold War America, yet thrills certain adolescent boys in a coal-mining town in West Virginia. The story is told by one of those boys in a way so magical, it’s hard to believe it’s all true.

Other modern forces impinge on Coalwood, West Virginia: the grinding change from industrial manufacturing toward the science and engineering pursuits that would dominate the second half of the 20th century. Yet even more meaning comes from enduring tensions—between a husband and wife over their differing views of what their lives should be, about lopsided love, about ordinary injustice and extraordinary courage.

The fragile combination of powerful forces required to lift a rocket seem similar to the forces that could shut down a hopeful young life…or raise it to the heights. These and other tensions keep you eagerly turning pages.

In 1998, Rocket Boys was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller, and serves as evidence that bestseller status and great literature can coincide (as indeed it did for the likes of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Steinbeck). The following year, Rocket Boys was made into an award-winning movie called October Sky.

Homer Hickam, born in 1943, dodged the mining engineer career his father had hoped for him, and instead made his career at NASA. The wonder is that he learned not only how to power rockets, but also how to power words so that they ignite with rare force.

And if you’re swept away with this memoir, there’s more good news. Rocket Boys is the first in a series of three memoirs, and Hickam has also written popular novels.

The history of Sputnik may also lead you to enjoy Sputnik: The Shock of the Century, by Paul Dickson.

Since both the book and the movie are marvelous (a “boovie” in my parlance), we can enjoy comparing the two. Why was the name changed to October Sky? What was left out and for what reason? Despite inevitable cuts, does the movie stay true to the book? Must it? Searching Wikipedia, www.imdb.com as well as the author’s own website, www.homerhickam.com, can lead to some surprising answers.

Reading, viewing, Web research: all of it is good. Rocket Boys reminds us that we explore literature because it’s meaningful and our perception of its meaning has a power to please us in ways we can’t fully understand—something like rockets soaring off into a cool October sky.

P.S. If you’re interested in adding any of the books I mentioned to your Library of Candidates, here’s a link to www.booksense.com, in case you’d like to buy them from your favorite independent bookstore.

January 22, 2008

If you ever get a chance to walk around the
lake, let me know if people still stack up stones on the place where his little
cabin once stood. It's been twenty-some years since I walked by, but the fond
memory lingers still.

January 16, 2008

For a luminous example of how books fuel action, all we need do is look at the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.

In his autobiography, King describes how reading Thoreau’s “On Civil Disobedience” while in college was transforming.

Here, in this courageous New Englander’s refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery’s territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times.

In 1955, King put that theory into practice. Mrs. Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. King helped transform that courageous first act into what would become the American Civil Rights Movement.

… what we were preparing to do in Montgomery was related to what Thoreau had expressed. We were simply saying to the white community, “We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system.”

In addition to Thoreau, King read philosophy and history and was fascinated by the nonviolent demonstrations of Gandhi. King grew up studying Scripture, and saw Gandhi’s work as a bold manifestation of Christian teachings.

Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale.

King’s book-fueled life of action was observed the world over. His 1964 Noble Peace Prize afforded him even more power. Despite being assassinated in 1968 at the age of 39, his actions and ringing voice echo still.

King’s life was inspiration to Nelson Mandela, who at the time of King’s death would serve another 12 years in prison on Robben Island, before emerging to lead South Africa and uproot the evil tree of apartheid.

One of the blessings of Martin Luther King’s lifespan was that it coincided with the era of audio recording.

The audio version of The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. contains original recordings of not only his famous “I Have a Dream,” speech, but also of lesser known speeches and sermons that posterity is most fortunate to have preserved.

Maja Thomas was the producer and director of the audio recordings. Over a five-year period, she collected the material from archives all over the United States. “Some existed only on the original cassettes that people brought to church, and contain short gaps from being turned over midway through the sermon,” recalled Maja last month.

Time Warner AudioBooks digitally remastered all the sermons and speeches. The resulting audio version of the autobiography won the Spoken Word Grammy in 2002.

It’s heartening to contemplate that long after all of us are gone, listeners yet unborn will be able to hear the power of Martin Luther King’s own voice urge them to face injustice anywhere they may have to.

“…either we go up together or we go down together. Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.”

January 09, 2008

Bernie Margolis would need only the red outfit to make a convincing Santa Claus. It’s not just his white hair and lively eyes. It’s the glee liable to break out at any moment—the joy that Bernie exudes about his workshop. Bernie’s workshop doesn’t make toys. Bernie’s workshop, which at the slightest prompting he will describe with a proprietor’s pride, is the Boston Public Library.

“Did you know the BPL is America’s only public library that is also a presidential library?” Bernie asked me on one of my first visits. “It’s John Adams’s Presidential Library. David McCullough researched his John Adams here, and later became a trustee. And let me show you the Abbey Room, which is truly amazing…”

It was on my first tour with Bernie that we came upon a pile of canvas bags down in the basement. I picked one up by its handles and saw that it was unusually deep, stenciled with “Boston Public Library,” and considerably worn.

“We’ve been using these bags for the past hundred years or so,” Bernie said. “The reason they’re so deep is so the delivery man can carry the most number of books relatively comfortably as he shuttles them between our branch libraries—from the truck, up and down stairs, that sort of thing.” Bernie picked up one bag in each hand. “It’s best if you carry two at a time to balance yourself,” he advised.

I knew we had to have them. Or rather, our customers did. They’d use this bag for any number of things, and they’d probably appreciate the history.

Little did I know what I was getting Levenger into when I convinced Bernie to let us reproduce the delivery bag. The project taught me what a stickler the affable Bernie Margolis can be.

Considering ourselves to be experts in bags, we sent the design specs to our top canvas-bag manufacturer. We were quite pleased with the first samples, tested them out loaded to the max with books, and sent the bags with high expectations to Bernie. A week later we heard from Bernie’s office.

The bottom needed to be doubled.

“No it doesn’t,” countered our bag designer, who considered herself the expert in such matters. “It’s plenty strong enough with the gauge of canvas and heavy-duty thread.”

“Well, no,” she agreed, holding the bag aloft and patting its bottom like a mother might pat her baby’s bottom. “It will just add some cost.”

The next round of samples with double layers of canvas did meet Bernie’s approval. Today, I’m proud to say, the delivery staff of the BPL uses these same bags on its daily rounds.

Stenciled inside the bag is the quotation etched in stone above theBoylston Street entrance of the BPL:

The Commonwealth Requires the Education of the People as the Safeguard of Order and Liberty.

I’m proud to report that Levenger has paid the Library more than $25,000 in royalties for the bags as of the fall of 2007, showing that commerce and charitable giving can travel together. Plus, it brings out that sparkle in Bernie’s eyes.

And so with the bag as our first project, we felt prepared for something bigger. To be more specific, two big bronze ladies who have presided in front of the library since 1914. More on this in a future report…

January 02, 2008

You can’t go for too long into a conversation with a group of people about movies before someone will say, “The book is so much better….”

But when you think about it, the comment is a bit strange. We love movies well enough, don’t we? All you need do is try to park at your local cinema on Saturday night to feel that love. If the books are always better, why don’t people just stay home and read?

Being naturally curious about such seeming contradictions, over the last few years I’ve endeavored to take movie conversations in a different direction. I ask people whether they can think of any movie that, in their opinion, is as good as the book on which it’s based.

Most people look off into space and come back empty, but a few have offered, a bit tentatively, some candidates. Here are some I’ve heard so far:

Several folks have nominated To Kill a Mocking Bird, Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-winning solo opus, which became the triple-Oscar winning 1962 classic with Gregory Peck, Brock Peters and a young Robert Duvall as Arthur “Boo” Radley.

Another nomination hit theaters exactly ten years later and also won three Oscars, The Godfather. Francis Ford Coppola directed the movie version of Mario Puzo’s book. (Several respondents have told me the movie is actually better than the book.)

A third candidate, nominated by no one but myself, is Cry the Beloved Country. It lit the big screen in 1995, starring James Earl Jones and Richard Harris. The movie is based on Alan Paton’s book, which was assigned to my son’s tenth-grade English class (and also to Oprah’s television audience). It’s about a young black burglar who murders a young white man who, ironically, was working for black equality in pre-apartheid South Africa. The scene when Jones and Harris, playing the two fathers, first meet is one of the finest scenes I’ve seen in the movies—both actors at the peak of their powers. And the book, too, is marvelous.

There are no doubt plenty of examples of good movies so different from their original books that there’s little point in searching for the original. In these cases, the movie is the thing.

In other cases, there never was a book. Casablanca, for example, was based on a play written in 1940 by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison called “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” which the playwrights, unable to find a producer, sold to Warner Brothers.

Plenty of good books should, by rights, make fine movies—but don’t. (I would put forth Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.) The reasons are multitudinous. Only rarely do stars align to create the double breathtaking book and movie combo.

We need a name for such rare double winners, so I suggest, with apologies to all lexicographers, the boovie.

Identifying boovies makes for more than just good dinner conversation, although that’s a worthy enough goal. The hunt for boovies can make for a deeper appreciation of our contemporary arts. We can argue the artistic judgments made in casting, acting, directing—what to leave out, what to create anew, why this or that element in the story works marvelously in print but can’t be done on the screen—and vice versa. That’s fun stuff to argue or agree about.

Boovies are rare for a few reasons. The story must be so compelling that screenwriters, directors, actors, and even business-minded producers become passionate about the project and are inspired to do their finest work. And then, on top of this, we have to get lucky. When we do get lucky enough to have a boovie, the book and movie can reinforce our enjoyment of the other.

The hunt for boovies gets people reading, and watching, and being moved by art—maybe even leading their lives in new ways.

So what do you think, dear reader and viewer? Can you nominate some boovies? Let me know. We’ll post the Levenger List of Most Popular Boovies, in order of most mentions.

Here, to prime your pump, are some more nominations:

Gone with the WindBen-HurThe Wizard of OzTreasure IslandDr. Zhivago 2001: A Space Odyssey Rosemary’s BabyJawsThe FirmThe Last Picture ShowHouse of Sand and FogOne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s NestGreat ExpectationsExodusSophie’s ChoiceThe English Patient A River Runs Through ItNo Country for Old MenHigh CrimesPride and Prejudice Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?/Blade RunnerRocket Boys/October SkyUnbearable Lightness of BeingThe Shipping NewsMystic River

Mystic River is a boovie candidate nominated
by author and friend Joe Finder, some of whose books—including High Crimes—have been made into movies. Click here to read more about Joe’s reading habits.